A vehicle-based monitor is a valuable resource for vehicle fleet organization, vehicle incident investigation, and vehicle liability control. A vehicle-based monitor can provide real-time information regarding the location, speed, and direction of a vehicle to a centralized system, in order to assist with travel planning. It can capture audio and video at all times or in response to an incident, in order to determine the cause of the incident and who was at fault. Given the low costs of data storage and transmission and the high costs of personal and property liability, it is in the best interests of a commercial vehicle owner to collect and store as much data as possible.
It is now feasible to collect and store very large amounts of vehicle data very quickly, e.g., high definition audio and video, high resolution sensor data, etc. Despite the critical nature of a subset of this data, the vast majority of it is unneeded (e.g., everything is fine). Costs for data collection and storage have fallen rapidly, however, and costs for data transmission have not fallen at the same pace. It is not economical for the system to transmit the large bulk of unneeded data over the expensive data transmission channels.